Finnish study demonstrates that personalized cancer therapies can improve outcomes in hematological oncology patients
In a project that lasted over a decade, researchers from the Institute for Molecular Medicine Finland (FIMM) have developed a functional precision medicine approach to treating aggressive hematological cancers which, they say, demonstrates that individualized therapy of aggressive hematological cancers is both possible and beneficial for patients with those conditions.
FIMM, which is part of the University of Helsinki and the Helsinki University Hospital Comprehensive Cancer Center in Finland, used functional precision medicine with 98% of the patients involved in the study. The FIMM researchers collaborated with SciLifeLab at the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, Sweden, and the Haukeland University Hospital in Bergen, Norway.
The international team of scientists published their findings in the peer-reviewed journal Cancer Discovery, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR), titled, “Implementing a Functional Precision Medicine Tumor Board for Acute Myeloid Leukemia.”
Advancing Drug Therapy Decision Making
The researchers tested more than 500 compounds on nearly 200 patients with relapsed adult acute myeloid leukemia (AML), a type of blood cancer with a poor prognosis. The team coupled this extensive candidate drug testing with patients’ clinical, genomic, and molecular profiling data.
“Our approach combines deep molecular profiling with comprehensive drug sensitivity testing of patient cells to advance the therapy decision-making system for the leukemia patients,” said translational cancer researcher and first author of the study, Disha Malani, PhD, in a University of Helsinki news release.
The strategy to integrate drug test information with multiple types of patient-specific data provided a comprehensive precision medicine approach that could be more widely applied than purely genomic-driven precision medicine.
“Compared to genomics-based precision medicine, drug testing provides informative and actionable results in a substantially higher fraction of patients,” said Kimmo Porkka, MD, PhD, in the news release. Porkka is a professor at the Helsinki University Hospital Comprehensive Cancer Center and was co-leader of the FIMM study.
Added Olli Kallioniemi, MD, PhD, professor and director of SciLifeLab, who co-led the FIMM study, “We still need further work in standardizing the methods, getting access to more drugs for patient treatment and data from randomized clinical trials, something that we wish to achieve in collaboration with the global research community, hospitals and the pharma industry.”
New Tumor Board Improves Communication of Test Results
The functional and molecular tumor board strategy developed by these researchers also enabled improved communication in addition to allowing improved functional precision medicine findings. “We developed a new method of communicating results to the clinic, via a multidisciplinary functional and molecular tumor board, something that we believe can in the future grow to become a system that learns from past cases to provide increasingly better recommendations for patient treatment,” Porkka said.
Study Identifies Best Drug Therapy for Nearly 100% of Participants
The results of the FIMM study were quite meaningful. Based on the researchers’ profiling results, a potentially actionable drug was identified for 98% of the patients. Many precision medicine approaches do not provide personalized treatment options for anywhere near this percentage of patients.
Additionally, 59% of patients responded to the personalized treatment provided. This patient group had a poor prognosis and no other treatment options, making these positive results doubly important. According to Porkka, “This is clearly advantageous for patients for whom standard therapy alternatives have been exhausted and there is an unmet need for alternative therapy options.”
Ultimately, this research could lead to meaningful improvements in treatment options as functional precision medicine allows the application of personalized drug therapies to larger percentages of hematological oncology patients.
Hospital and oncology leaders should be aware of this recent advance in functional precision medicine for blood cancers, as well as the different ways tumor boards are designed. The novel functional and molecular tumor board strategy that FIMM researchers developed may serve as a model that can be implemented in the management of hematological oncology patients and used to improve precision medicine offerings.
—Caleb Williams
Related Information:
Implementing a Functional Precision Medicine Tumor Board for Acute Myeloid Leukemia